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4 Investing Podcast Recommendations for This Summer

If you’ve got some time to kill or a long car ride ahead of you, you might want to try some of these business-themed podcasts.

Taking a road trip this summer? You might want to try picking up a new podcast. In this Industry Focus: Tech segment, host Dylan Lewis is joined by senior analysts Jason Moser and David Kretzmann and asks them to share some of their favorite business and finance-themed podcasts.

A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on July 7, 2017.

Dylan Lewis: On the podcast side, I don't know about you guys, but I will highly recommend to our listeners, outside of the Foolish shows, the StartUp podcast from Gimlet, and How I Built This from NPR. I don't know if you've listened to either of those shows.

Jason Moser: I have. How I Built This, I have, but not the other one.

Lewis: Yeah. How I Built This is an incredible show. The guy who hosts it, Guy Raz, basically just chats with founders and entrepreneurs, talks about how they started these massively popular businesses. I just listened to the episode with Tony Hsieh from Zapposrecently. I think something that was really cool in that one was, he basically said, "Zappos could be an anything company, we're a customer service company that just happens to sell shoes." So, when you listen to these types of podcasts and read these types of books, what you get is this lens into management philosophy and really what guides these businesses that you may or may not be investing in. I always think that's helpful.

With the StartUp podcast, since neither of you guys have listened to it, I will evangelize to you about it. Alex Blumberg, the guy behind Gimlet Media and the podcast itself, he was at This American Life and he did some work for Planet Money, and he basically decided, "I think I can go out and build my own private podcasting company." The first season of the StartUp podcast is him documenting going about doing that. So, he winds up going on VC pitch walks, and he's talking with Chris Sacca about this business he wants to found, he's doing equity negotiations with employees, he's talking about, what is the right rate to grow at, all of these different things that you typically don't get to see with an early stage business. I think it's a very honest and candid look at how difficult it can be to start a business and get something off the ground. He had the benefit of having the podcast basically create all this buzz for Gimlet Media and it wound up being this runaway success. But, if you're like me and your kind of a media nerd and a business nerd, it's a great overlap there, so I will highly recommend that. Anything that you guys are listening to right now that you particularly enjoy?

David Kretzmann: Sort of along those lines, I don't know if you've listened to This Week In Startups with Jason Calacanis. He's a really successful angel investor, he was an early investor in Uber and a bunch of other companies. Several times a week, he'll interview different entrepreneurs, VCs, investors, really people all across the board and just talk about what's going on in the start-up world. Again, a nice way to keep a pulse on what's happening there. Season 2 of Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell is out, that's a great podcast just for someone who thinks differently about the world. You won't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions, but he's someone who looks at the world in a fundamentally different way than just about anyone else, and for me that's always a fascinating thing to listen to. So, those are two that I've been listening to lately.

Lewis: I listened to the episode where he revisited the Toyota brake scandal. That was an incredible episode, very well done.

Kretzmann: Yeah, essentially saying that it wasn't Toyota's fault. It was actually, people, instead of slamming on the brakes in the moment where they were trying to find a brake, they ended up slamming on the gas pedal, but it still blew up into this huge scandal, which I never would have thought of.

Lewis: Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell is not shying away from controversial opinions on this podcast, I think we can say that. Jason, what about you? What are you listening to in the car, or anything like that these days?

Moser: I'm a big sucker for Freakonomics. It's always interesting. They never fail to tell you a neat story, an interesting way to look at any given situation. They pretty much don't limit themselves. I think the Freakonomics podcast is always a really good one. And then, another one, it's much in line with what we do here in regard to financial education and literacy, helping people take care of their own money, there's a podcast called Manage Your Damn Money, best podcast title ever. Ben Carter is the gentleman behind it. Ben actually came to visit us a couple weeks ago in the studio to sit in with a taping of Motley Fool Money. That's another good one. If you're looking to find something similar to the stuff that we're doing, but a little bit different, Manage Your Damn Money is a very, very good podcast to consider.